Job Set for 14 Mount Points - 46 exist

[Louharle]

Hello, trying to figure out why Veeam is not cleaning up after itself - I assume that if you set it for 14 mount points to keep on disk, at the 15th one it will purge the oldest -correct? I have it set for 14 and there are 46 (currently) under a job.. Thoughts?

Thanks,

Lou Harle

[Alexey D.]

Hello Louis,

Which are your settings for backup mode and for transform? Which files and with which extensions are you seeing in the target folder?
It may be a normal behavior depending on your settings.

[Louharle]

1 VBK and 45 VIB's -

Incremental - enable synthetic fulls (forever-incremental)

[tsightler]

How old is your VBK? Seems like the synthetic fulls are not running. When do you have them scheduled to run? How often is the job running?

[Louharle]

That i believe was the problem - wasn't ever doing an Active Full.... Set it to run tonight and will monitor, does that sound correct?

[alexfeig1]

I opened a ticket about this one myself. It turns out that if the backup is failing, it will not honor retention points until it starts to succeed.

[Louharle]

Ok, still not cleaning up retention points... now I have a brand new VBK but still 45 *.vib's - anyone??

[tsightler]

Logically your requirement to keep 14 restore points can't be met until there are at least 14 more restore points from the last VBK.

In other words, you have a full backup, then 46 incrementals, then a full backup. If Veeam deletes the first full backup, and 33 incrementals, you'll be left with 13 incrementals and a full backup, except those 13 incrementals will be worthless since the full backup on which they were based would be deleted. Setting the number of retention points for incremental backups sets the minimum number that will be retained. The maximum number might vary based on the interval that you run full backups (either active or synthetic).

This has been explained in another thread, but here it is again for simplicity. Let's say you run backups every day, and you want to keep 14 restore points, and you run a full every week. After one week you get this:

Week 1: F...I...I...I...I...I...I

So that's one full, and 6 incrementals, for a total of 7 restore points, now the second week:

Week 1: F...I...I...I...I...I...I
Week 2: F...I...I...I...I...I...I

So that's two fulls and 12 incrementals for a total of 14 restore points, now it's day 15, and you run another full and end up with this:

Week 1: F...I...I...I...I...I...I
Week 2: F...I...I...I...I...I...I
Week 3: F

You've told veeam to keep 14 restore points, but it can't delete the full backup from week one, because that would invalidate all of the incremental backups from week 1 and leave you with the following:

Week 2: F...I...I...I...I...I...I
Week 3: F

That's only 8 restore points, and you've told Veeam to keep 14. Veeam will not delete the first weeks backups until the last backup of Week 3 because at that point you'd have 21 backups:

Week 1: F...I...I...I...I...I...I
Week 2: F...I...I...I...I...I...I
Week 3: F...I...I...I...I...I...I

Thus if Veeam deletes Week 1 I get:

Week 2: F...I...I...I...I...I...I
Week 3: F...I...I...I...I...I...I

14 backups, which meets the requirement.

If you want Veeam to keep the exact number of restore points you can use reverse incrementals since in that case the oldest backup can always be deleted, otherwise, it's no different than tape backup retention has been forever, the ratio of full to incremental backups will determine the number of backups that have to be kept to meet a minimum retention period.

[Alexey D.]

Thanks for good explanation, Tom.

Louis, what is your schedule for backup?

[Gostev]

Here is the existing topic with another possible explanation for this issue > "Restore points to keep" being ignored?

[flavor4real]

I have search this subject for a while and I guess that my post will be merged with some other or removed. I still have to ask this one here, just to see if I understood that right.

A Job runs Mon - Fri, 1 time a day, full synthetic on Friday.
Restore Points to keep on disk is set to 10
Delete VM's ret. period is set to 10

that would mean that I have 2 weeks of backups. did I understood right?

[neo_italy]

Hello,
to save disk space on backup repository, we have configured multiple VMs with a maximum of 30 restore points. Now, because the repository filesystem is full, we are checking and there are more restore points than the maximum defined.

Someone can explan why?

Many thanks

[pparks1]

neo_italy,

A lot will depend upon whether you are doing incremental backups or reverse incrementals. With reverse incrementals, you have 1 .VBK file that gets appended to daily, and a .VRB is created for each previous point in time. So, with 30 day retention, you would have 30 files, and when the 31st file gets created, the oldest .VRB is deleted.

If you use incremental backups, its far more complex. Image if you will, that you do backups on weekdays only (M-F), and you do a synthetic full backup on Friday. Lets say that you want to keep 10 restore points.

1st Monday: Full backup
1st Tuesday: Incremental
1st Wed: Incremental
1st Thurs: Incremental
1st Fri: Incremental first, then sythentic runs, leaving new full backup (and this particular incremental is deleted).

So, after the 1st week: You have 2 full backups (1st monday and 1st friday), with 3 incrementals (.vib's on Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday). And you have a total of 5 more points.

2nd Monday: Incremental
2nd Tuesday: incremental
2nd Wed: Incremental
2nd Thurs: incremental
2nd Friday: Incremental first, then sythentic runs, leaving new full backup (and this particular incremental is deleted).

So, after the 2nd week: You now have 3 full backups (1st Monday, 1st Friday, 2nd Friday) and you have 7 incrementals (1st Tuesday, 1st wed, 1st thurs, 2nd mon, 2nd tues, 2nd wed and 2nd thursday). Overall you now have 10 restore points.

3rd monday: Incremental runs. (Thus you have hit restore point number 11). So, now the system can delelete that 1st restore point, right? Nope. That first restore point (from 1st Monday...is a full. The incrementals on 1st Tues, 1st Wed, and 1st Thursday NEED the 1st Monday full to be of any use. Therefore the system cannot delete the 1st Monday yet..as that would also delete 1st Tues, 1st Wed, and 1st Thursday. Thus leaving only 7 restore points (1st Friday, 2nd mon, 2nd tues, 2nd wed, 2nd thurs, 2nd friday, 3rd monday).

3rd tuesday: incremental runs
3rd wednesday: incremental runs
3rd thursday: incremental runs
3rd friday: Incremental first, then sythentic runs, leaving new full backup (and this particular incremental is deleted).

It's at this point, with 4 full backups, and 11 incrementals..comprising 15 retore points that anything can be deleted. After the 3rd friday backup, it can now delete 1st Monday full and 1st tues Incremental, 1st wednesday incremental and 1st thursday incremental. Once those delete, you end up with 10 restore points on disk.

Be aware, when you run your synthetic fulls you must schedule them to run on a day when you run backups or they never happen. For example, in the above scenario, if you scheduled backups to occur on M-F..but checked the box for a Saturday synthetic full, since the job won't launch on Saturday, the synethetic fulls never get created. Thus, you end up with tons of incrementals...which can never clear out as you cannot delete the very fist Full..which all subsequent incrementals depend upon.

[homermg]

[merged]

Hi all,

I'm just wondering about the restorepoints.
I have enabled the "Restore Points to keep = 5". But i have now allready 17 restorepoints and 4 full backups.
I only need one week, i mean Monday= Full and the rest of the week differential.
Can anybody help me to setup it right way?
thanks!

[pparks1]

homermg,

What type of backup are you doing? Based on what you have said above it sounds like "Incremental" if you multiple full backups. The opposite approach is reverse incrementals where you only have 1 full backup (.vbk) and X number of restore points (.vrb's)

So, lets say you want to keep 1 week...or 5 backup files with an incremental approach and you only backup on weekdays (Mon-Fri)

So, 1st Monday you take a full backup.
1st Tuesday..you take an incremental backup
1st Wednesday..you take another incremental
1st Thursday..you take another incremental
1st Friday..you take another incremental

So, after 1st week, you have 5 files. 1 full backup and 4 incrementals

So, the following Monday you want to schedule a "synthetic full backup". So, on 2nd Monday...you would take a new incremental...and then it would combine the previous full from 1st monday, with all other incrementals and make a new full on the 2nd Monday...and thus delete the 2nd Monday incremental

So, at the end of the day on the 2nd Monday..you now have 6 files. Full backup from 1st Monday...incrementals on 1st Tues, 1st Wed, 1st Thur, 1st Friday, and full backup on 2nd Monday.

At this point, even though you now have 6 files (and thus 1 more than you want), Veeam cannot auto delete the oldest file...because that's the full backup from the 1st Monday...and without the first Monday full...the incrementals from 1st Tues, 1st Wed, 1st Thurs, and 1st Thurs would be useless.

Thus, on 2nd Tuesday you will get Incremental
on 2nd Wedness you will get Incremental
on 2nd Thursday you get incremental
on 2nd Friday you get incremental.

So, we now have 10 files total 2 full backups (1st Monday and 2nd Monday) and 8 incrementals for Tues-Fri of each of fist 2 weeks. At the end of Friday, you can actually delete that 1st week....as you would be left with 5 restore points (2nd Fri, 2nd Thurs, 2nd Wed, 2nd Tues, and full backup from 2nd Monday). So you would be down to 5 files now.

After the 3rd Monday Synthetic full gets created....and now you will be up to 7 files. And you will add files again until the next Friday.


Another thing: Lets say that you have a VM that you backup during the 1st 2 days. Then on the third day you remove the VM and you remove the VM selection from the job. When the job next runs, since that VM is no longer present..and not getting added to the backup routine....the system is unable to remove any previous backups as it wouldn't have more than 5 backups for this removed VM. This is where the deleted VM's retention period comes in. If you have this set to default of 14 days...you would have to go at least 14 days until the system will automatically any files containing that now missing VM. A way around this is to find the VM listed in the backups, and choose to delete it. Once it's out of the backup, the next time the job runs, the system will clean up after itself.

[Titanmike]

[merged]

All the backup jobs in this environment are configured to run incremental backups and only run a full backup once a week (Saturday) with the retention set to 2 days

(no synthetic full or reverse incremental)



However, as you can see it keeps more than 2 restore points .. including two full backups



As a result we are running into disk space issues. The question now

1. Why aren't the old restore points being deleted.
2. How can I safely remove points from the chain ?

Thanks

[Gostev]

1. The old restore points are not being deleted because you set the job to keep 2 restore points, which in turn requires us to keep whole previous chain (as the last 2 incremental restore points are dependent on previous full and all increments). This is not something specific to Veeam - just the basics of incremental backup.

2. By definition of incremental backup, there is no possibility to delete specific restore points from incremental backup chain. If you need to delete previous restore points, you can only delete whole chain (full and all related increments). However, this will put you out of compliance with your own retention policy, where you said you want to keep previous 2 restore points always available.

Incremental backup mode is not very disk-space efficient, which is why we provide transform option for it, as well as reversed-incremental backup mode. Both allow you to keep only 1 full backup on disk at any given moment, as well as delete older restore points immediately as they fall out of scope of retention policy. There is detailed comparison of all backup modes we provide available in sticky FAQ topic that covers all pros and cons of each mode.

[jorgene]

[merged]

Hi,

I have a weird issue regarding a Backup Job.
We have scheduled backups of a couple of WM's Mon-Fri. (One Job)
14 Days Retention Policy.
Backup Mode Incremental (Enabled synthetic full on Saturday)

Now when i look in the backup destination folder i only have VIB files and ALOT of them(way beond the retention policy), no VBK files.
So it seems like Syntectic full on Saturday don't work, and that's why i have so many VIB files.

How should i proceed to troubbleshoot this ? Which log file should i look in ?
Can i force a synthetic full backup?
Note* When i looked into Schedule it was set to Run Automatically "on these days" with Mon-Fri selected.
I changed it to Run automatically "on week days" instead (will that solve the problem with synthetic full backup not running on saturday) ?

[kmille1398]

[merged]

Hi,

I am currently running Veeam Backup & Replication 5.02. Love the product, but am constantly fighting disk space issues. We run Synthetic Fulls to run on the weekend. As an example, if I have a Full job run for a set of Windows 2003 server VMs, on Friday, and Incrementals that run Monday-Friday the following week, with a new Synthetic Full to be created that night. If the number of Restore points to keep on Disk were set to 1, when that new Synthetic Full got created, would all previous incrementals and the previous Full VBK file get deleted by Veeam? Ideally, we would like to keep one Full VBK and 4 incremental VIB files for any backup job on the disk. We run Full backups to tape on Sunday, and back up the incremental VIBs to tape each night as well. Those tapes then go offsite, and could be recalled if we ever had to go back longer than 1 week to restore a VM or guest files from a VM backup. Our corporate retention policy is 6 weeks for all backups. So, our thought is to have 1 week of VM backups on the disk, and the rest on tape if we need to recall it.

Right now the Restore Points to keep on disk is set to 5, but I think that leaves open the scenario to have more than one VBK file on the disk at any one time, which we do not want. That is why I was thinking of changing that number to 1.

Thanks,

Kevin

[George]

[merged]

Hi Guys,

Some questions for you...

I have a backup running at the moment and under Retention Policy i have set the restore points to 3 from 7. So what i was expecting was for the redundant 4 generations to be delete off or removed from my backup repository. The reason i am doing this is because of space issues. Is there a way i can reduce down the number of generations and allow for surplus generations to be deleted via the backup software and not have to manually go and remove them.

Let me know if you need more clarification or anything.

Thanks

[dellock6]

Are you using forward incremental? If so, previous VBK and VIB files need to te kept on disk even if expired until the last VIB served by the first VBK also expires. Check the user guide about Retention policies and how they apply to forward incremental.

[prointernet]

Hi Veeam,

i have a JOB (v6.5) with restore point limit set to 14 but it doesnt work. I have 45 points in my backup file at the moment.
Is there a way to start a consolidation job maybe via powershell? I dont want to create a new full backup ...

Job Settings:
Incremental with local SATA Storage
- Synthetic fulls on Saturday
- Transofmr previous full backup chains into rollbacks ...

Sebastian

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Sebastian,

How many VBK files (full backups) do you have on the target repository?

Thanks!

[JamesHorsfield]

Hi,

I've got quick question with regards to the the number of restore points.

We have a 4TB backup share on a netapp box, i've set a full backup on the first sat of the month and incremental backups.
The Retention policy is set to 15 days.

If im correct that will mean there will be 30 files or 32 ?(vib & vbk) on the backup share?

I dont have much space left and i fear it may run out of space before veeam removes some of the old backups. (Veeam will remove the old files and free up space if they are not needed yes?)

Can I reduce the number of restore points to 10 by editing the backup job in veeam and when this job runs tonight will it remove the uneeded restore points? Also will the restore if needed still work for the remaining restore points?

Thanks,

James.

[foggy]

James, please review this thread for better understanding of forward incremental mode specifics. Basically, if you need to clean up some space, you should perform a full backup and decrease the retention parameter. After creating the specified number of restore points, Veeam B&R will delete all unneeded files.

[JamesHorsfield]

Hi,

Thanks for merging this thread it made interesting reading. It has given me a slightly better understadning of incremental backups.

But how would you setup a backup schedule to do a full backup every two weeks and keep 14 days worth of data. I understand that there would be a cross over of 2 weeks waiting for the incrementals to become out of the retention policy.

F= full & I = Incremental
Sat - Fri
WK1
F I I I I I I

WK 2
I I I I I I I

WK 3
F I I I I I I

WK 4
I I I I I I I

I can only set and active full backup on the **** of the month or weekly on scheduled days? By doing this this would not give me the above?

Thanks,
James.

[foggy]

But how would you setup a backup schedule to do a full backup every two weeks and keep 14 days worth of data. I understand that there would be a cross over of 2 weeks waiting for the incrementals to become out of the retention policy.

Correct. You will have something from 14 to 28 restore points on disk depending on the day of the week.

I can only set and active full backup on the **** of the month or weekly on scheduled days? By doing this this would not give me the above?

It doesn't matter which type of full backup you perform (synthetic or active), retention policy works identically in both cases.

[JamesHorsfield]

Thank you for your help.

I've edited the backup job to do 1 full backup every saturday and 6 incrementals with a retention policy of 7 days which would give me between 7 - 14 days worth of backups which will pretty much fill my backup share with a little room for extra virtual machines etc if they are created.

I'll remove the older backups manually if they are not removed tonight.

Thanks.

James.

[Rumple]

I am running 6.5 and configured my jobs to keep 7 restores on disk..
I have configured the jobs with Incremental with Synthetic fulls on Saturday. I do NOT have the transform previous full backups chains enabled

I was looking at my backups and realized I have 34 backups available for one of the jobs (and most others have at least 17 depending on when I created them)
Methinks something isn't working as expected or I've done something wrong...
When I look at the backups on disk and tried a restore i am not seeing anything but the initial full and incrementals...shouldn't I be seeing a synthetic full every saturday at the very least?

[veremin]

Hello.

Can you confirm how many .VBK-files do you have on your target repository? It seems like you have only one .VBK and lots of .VIB-files.

Your backup mode is set to be forward incremental, thus, the retention policy will be used after you create another .VBK-file(full backup) and run the job at least 6 times (incremental). As soon as you’ve done this, make sure your synthetic fulls are scheduled to run at least once a week.

By the way, did you job start on Saturday or it didn’t (this information can be seen via session logs)?

Thanks.